Question

Q:

Below presents six observations recorded during a waste walk at a hospital ward. Discuss the types of Muda for each observation, and classify them accordingly. There are 8 waste: defects, overproduction, waiting, not using staff talent, transportation, inventory, motion and excessive processing.

1. Non-bed ridden patients were being transported to the ward by bed instead of wheelchair. After which, the porter had to bring back the bed to the ward.



2. Patients waited an average of 45 mins before the ward clerk could process the necessary paper work to facilitate the ward transfer.

3. The ward clerk was observed to make multiple trips between the ward clerk station and the various beds to get stationaries and forms.

4. Observations were made of various nurses performing vital measurements on a number of patients on more than one occasion within a short time interval of 30 mins.

5. On a number of blood test request forms, the supervising clinician’s signatures were missing and the nurses had to call the clinicians back to ward.

6. Patients who were required to undergo radiologic diagnostic tests (e.g. X-ray), had to be transported to the Diagnostic Imaging Centre that is three blocks away. The end-to-end transportation process took an average of 3.5 hours per patient.

Please indicate which waste is belong to each scenario and explain the reason in detail.

Answer 1

ANSWER :

1)OVER PROCESSING :

• The work performed which was not necessary for the patient.
• In the above scenario non-bed ridden patient was transported in bed which was not necessary.

2)WAITING :

• Anything which causes the patient to wait for the next event leads to waste of time and resources.
• In the above scenario , patient waited for 45 minutes for the paper work which is of waste.

3)MOTION :

• Unnecessary movement of employees from one room to another or one floor to another is also a waste.
• In the above scenario, ward clerk is moving multiple times from ward clerk station to patient beds to get stationaries and forms which is not so necessary

4)OVER PRODUCTION :

• Doing anything more than what actually needed by the patient.
• In the above scenario, the nurses are monitoring vitals more frequently at intervals of 30min.

5)DEFECT :

• Time spent for inspecting and fixing errors
• In the above scenario, as the clinician had not done his signature the nurse is inspecting all the prescription forms for signature and calling back him which is a waste of time and resources

6)TRANSPORTATION :

• Unnecessary transportation of patient for long distances due to poor layout of the hospital for any investigation or procedure is wasteful.
• In the above scenario , the patient was taken for diagnostic imaging centre which took about 3.5 hours for end to end transportation.